More Nails in the Global Warming Swindle Coffin

Compiled by Gary Starr for the Nevill Awards
Posted August 20, 2011

Global Warming proponents are like the Energizer Bunny. Regardless of the latest research that debunks the crackpot theory, regardless of the latest business failures that are fueled by Obama investment bucks (taxpayer ripoffs), they just keep on going.

Herewith five more examples that will have you pulling your hair out:

From The Wall Street Journal:

Neville Update:
Solar Flare-out--Another green government favorite goes belly up...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240531
11904583204576542742515097256.html

Another day, another stimulus burnout. On Wednesday, solar panel maker and White House favorite Solyndra announced plans to suspend business and file for bankruptcy. Its demise is a reminder of the perils of politically directed investment.

This wasn't supposed to be the storyline. In March 2009, Solyndra was the first company to get an Energy Department loan guarantee, worth $535 million. Vice President Joe Biden spoke via closed circuit TV at the groundbreaking of the company's Fremont, California plant, and President Obama touted the thousands of jobs the stimulus money would create. Such investments were all the better, Mr. Obama said at a visit to the plant last spring, because "The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra." You know, "green jobs."

Lots of venture capital companies bought into the hype, investing in green technology to piggyback their own capital on federal favoritism. Solyndra's relationship with the White House came under special scrutiny because of Solyndra backer and Tulsa billionaire George Kaiser's history as an Obama fundraiser. In a letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu in February, the House Energy and Commerce Committee raised concerns about the loan, noting that the company had suffered "financial setbacks," and asking for information about "whether Solyndra was the right candidate" for the loan guarantee.

The Department of Energy marched on anyway, and yesterday it said it has "always recognized that not every one of the innovative companies supported by our loans and loan guarantees would succeed." Well, sure, businesses fail, but most failures don't saddle taxpayers with as much as $535 million in potential losses.

Solyndra's story is more evidence that trendy, politically directed investments don't make for efficient allocation of capital. Beyond the immediate losses, they mean the money wasn't available for market-directed investment with a better chance to succeed. This is how you get a 1% recovery.

Excerpted from Yahoo News:

New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism
By James Taylor | Forbes - Wed, Jul 27, 2011
http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-global-warming-alarmism-192334971.html

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than alarmist United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed. In addition to finding that far less heat is being trapped , the NASA satellite data show the atmosphere begins shedding heat into space long before the UN computer models predicted.

"The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show," study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said in a July 26 press release. "There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans."

In short, the central premise of global warming theory is that carbon dioxide emissions should be directly and indirectly trapping a certain amount of heat in the earth's atmosphere and preventing it from escaping into space. Real-world measurements, however, show far less heat is being trapped in the earth's atmosphere than the alarmist computer models predict, and far more heat is escaping into space than the alarmist computer models predict.

When objective NASA satellite data, reported in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, show a "huge discrepancy" between alarmist climate models and real-world facts, climate scientists, the media and our elected officials would be wise to take notice. Whether or not they do so will tell us a great deal about how honest the purveyors of global warming alarmism truly are.

James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News.

Excerpted from Human Events:

Seattle: $20 Million Stimulus Creates 14 Jobs
The magic of Obamanomics makes money disappear.
by John Hayward
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=45582

Last year, right before Earth Day, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn traveled to the White House to announce a wondrous $20 million federal grant to create "green jobs" in the weatherization industry. Insulating houses would create at least 2,000 jobs, and save the Earth by reducing Seattle's carbon footprint, which is probably even bigger than Al Gore's.

A year later, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer surveys the ruins of another in the long, long, long string of miserable Obama failures:

As of last week, only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program. Many of the jobs are administrative, and not the entry-level pathways once dreamed of for low-income workers. Some people wonder if the original goals are now achievable.

"The jobs haven't surfaced yet," said Michael Woo, director of Got Green, a Seattle community organizing group focused on the environment and social justice.

"It's been a very slow and tedious process. It's almost painful, the number of meetings people have gone to. Those are the people who got jobs. There's been no real investment for the broader public."

You read that right: fourteen jobs. At a cost to the U.S. taxpayer (well, the U.S. taxpayer's unborn children) of twenty million dollars. That works out to $1,428,571.43 per job created.

Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal:

Nevergreen Solar -- Another political investment goes bust.
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB10001424053111903392904576512471704476678.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

In 2008, Reuters published one of those stories predicting that green power would be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in five years. Headline: "As Energy Costs Soar, U.S. Looks to Solar." Among the prophets was Richard Feldt, then the CEO of Evergreen Solar, who said that "it's not far away" and called for more subsidies. On Monday, Evergreen filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

In the grave-dancing department, let's note that failure is part of the risk-taking and creative destruction that drive growth, and that Evergreen got its start in 1994 with an innovation that reduced the costs of silicon panels. The bankruptcy is notable mainly because the Massachusetts-based manufacturer received so much taxpayer support.

Governor Deval Patrick took a $58 million stake in Evergreen in 2007 with direct subsidies and tax breaks in return for the company building a plant in the state. The goal was "to help Evergreen Solar grow and thrive right here in Massachusetts, and give us a head start toward building a clean energy economy," Mr. Patrick said at the time.

But in January, Evergreen, shedding cash, shut down the Devens plant and fired 800 workers, claiming it was at a competitive disadvantage because U.S. solar subsidies are lower than China's. In a letter to the Journal, the U.S. solar lobby in Washington said the solution was to follow "Chinese policy makers" and make "strategic investments to attract this rapidly growing industry."

So the Commonwealth subsidies weren't enough for Evergreen to succeed because the federal subsidies weren't enough, even though with the stimulus the Obama Energy Department has become one of the largest venture capital firms in the world.

Excerpted from NY Times:

Number of Green Jobs Fails to Live Up to Promises
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/us/19bcgreen.html?_r=2
August 18, 2011
By AARON GLANTZ

Flanked by a cadre of local political leaders, Mayor Chuck Reed of San Jose used a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a solar power company last week to talk up the promise of the green economy.

Mr. Reed called the opening of the new headquarters of SolFocus, which produces large, free-standing solar panels, an "enormously important" development for the city's economy.

"Clean technology is the next wave of innovation that Silicon Valley needs to capture," the mayor said, noting that the San Jose City Council had committed to increasing the number of "green jobs" in the city to 25,000 by 2022. San Jose currently has 4,350 such jobs, according to city officials.

But SolFocus assembles its solar panels in China, and the new San Jose headquarters employs just 90 people.

In the Bay Area as in much of the country, the green economy is not proving to be the job-creation engine that many politicians envisioned. President Obama once pledged to create five million green jobs over 10 years. Gov. Jerry Brown promised 500,000 clean-technology jobs statewide by the end of the decade. But the results so far suggest such numbers are a pipe dream.

"I won't say I'm not frustrated," said Van Jones, an Oakland activist who served briefly as Mr. Obama's green-jobs czar before resigning under fire after conservative critics said he had signed a petition accusing the Bush administration of deliberately allowing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a claim Mr. Jones denies.

A Neville Note: Van Jones is a self-admitted Communist who worked in the White House, one of many Communists who have had to leave the administration because of pro-communist sentiments. Others who were forced out include Communications chief Anita Dunn, a Mao admirer, and Manufacturing Czar Ron Bloom who called the free market "nonsense" and agreed with Mao that power comes from the point of a gun, and the recently departed self-proclaimed communist Climate Czar Carole Browner. Other extreme leftists still in the administration include Science Czar John Holdren, Regulation Czar Cass Sunstein, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and radical EPA chief Lisa Jackson.